Monday, 19 September 2011

How ICL came to axe the CODIL project

On the 3rd of
May 1968 John Aris, who had worked on Leo Computers, was then Manager of Applied Systems in English
Electric Computers, and laterDirector of the National Computer Centre
wrote: about a new research project called DORIS (later renamed
CODIL):

DORIS, a 'Data
ORiented Information System', is an original and radically new;
approach to the systems/programming of computers, devised by Dr. C.
Reynolds of this Department. It involves holding a large proportion
of the decision-making logic, normally built into user programs, as
part of the data files, and analyzing it not with a variety of
special applications programs, but with one general purpose decision
making routine. If this proves viable it could result in the virtual
demise of the conventional application program in many fields,
replacing it by the said general purpose routine and groups of
calculation routines. Its data structure, being closer to the
ordinary modes of human thought than computer files generally are,
could allow the ultimate user far greater freedom to use the computer
as an information handler in a familiar way, and without the need for
expensive commercial programmers. This would, among other advantages,
ease the implementation of management information systems. A further
important consequence could be a new approach to CPU design.

Despite
the fact that the experimental research program that had been set up
to test the idea achieved all its goals, showing that the idea
actually worked, the project was unceremoniously dropped two years
later following the merger to form International Computers Ltd. As principal investigator,
who was given permission to follow up the idea in a university
environment, I have extensive files on the project – but these lack
some of the managerial assessments that must have taken place before
the project was originally supported, and also leading to the final
closure. I was therefore interested to discover that folder 1/89 in the J M M Pinkerton section of the ICL archives in the Science Museum Library at Swindon dealt with the project.

In
fact the folder proved to be very thin, and, for instance, does not
even include the six design documents which supported the original
proposals or the draft report that became the basis of the Computer
Journal paper CODIL: The CODIL language and its interpreter. It is perhaps relevant that this report was written to describe the software when
closure seemed a possibility, in a way that would not embarrass ICL by making extensive general claims on publication, and the implications of the idea, as described by John Aris, were not dwelt on in any detail.

While most of the documents were either written by me, or I had seen them at the time there were two single page
documents relevant to the decision to close the project. In
September 1969 Basil de Ferranti (who was clearly interested in systems which in some way modeled the brain) sent the following letter to P. D.
Hall and L. Lightstone with copies to P. V. Ellis, J. M. M.
Pinkerton, J. Meredith Smith and A. C. D Haley.

One of the significant projects which was under way at Minerva Road, and which came to the Research Department originally
from the E[nglish] E[lectric] sales side, was based on a new approach
to modularising customer software.

Called CODIL the technique has won a number of
supporters and would appear to be not only a useful product in
certain well defined areas, such as product distribution centres, but
also to carry an underlying principle which could be applied in many
areas. The key figure in the development of CODIL was Dr. Reynolds
and the question is really whether or not we wish to retain his
services. Clearly if there is merit in CODIL we would wish to but if
the company doesn't wish to take it up I think it improbable that he
would wish to stay.

Perhaps you would like to take advice on this matter
and let me know what further action we might take.

Basil de Ferranti had been Managing Director of ICT before the merger but had been "demoted" to Research Director, with no
responsibility for the New Range (later 2900 series) computers at the time of the merger. He left the company not long afterwards, and his pivotal position in UK computing in the 1960s hardly get a mention in many of the accounts of his career. I suspect that his letter was
treated as non-urgent by the recipients, as the problem of the
project and my employment were really Basil's problem at a time when
the company was in turmoil trying to cope with the effects of the
merger. What I guess happened is that nothing was done until it
became urgent to make a decision because I was still there and the
old Research Division which managed me had been closed! I guess that at the end of January 1970 an urgent
request (not on file) was sent out for an assessment. As a result the
following two assessments were hurriedly written on a single page
early in February, possibly using the recently written draft report.
I have no idea who the authors were or what their status was within
ICL (except that they were probably with ICT before the merger).
Definitely the authors did not contact me for clarification on any
point, or allow me a chance to comment on what they had written.

Report by
G. C. Sibthorpe – dated 4th February 1970

Although I am not
very familiar with CODIL[1]
it appears to me to have one major disadvantage over similar
languages such as SPECOL[2].

CODIL
imposes its own file organisation on a set of structured data [3]
and could not, therefore, be used to interrogate existing files.
SPECOL on the other hand enables a data structure to be superimposed
upon conventionally organised files. The data structure in this case
is a set of parameters to the interpreter[4].

Since
CODIL, like SPECOL, at present only processes files sequentially[5]
I cannot see users taking the trouble to set files up (which cannot
yet be amended)[6]
for the rather doubtful benefits that it offers[7].This would particularly apply if PEARL[8]
(or something similar) is just around the corner!

[1]
I doubt that he had had any contact with CODIL apart from reading a
single document describing it – definitely there was no technical
contact with me on the subject. The opening words read like
management speak for “I haven't the vaguest – but as you
insist on a report pretty damn quick I will write one without
bothering to spend much time on it.”

[2]
CODIL was a general-purpose language optimised to automatically
process poorly structured information for a very wide range of tasks
in a human friendly way. SPECOL was a specialised information
retrieval package designed by a Civil Service user to search arrays
of well-structured data generated by other packages. To treat CODIL
and SPECOL as similar is about as inappropriate as comparing the compiler of the then
popular programming language COBOL with one specialist component of a payroll
package and complaining that the COBOL compiler doesn't do payroll!

[3] He
has totally missed the point that CODIL is specifically aimed at
tasks where it is, in part at least, difficult to design
conventionally structured files. In conventional systems at the time
(including SPECOL) a data field could only contain a single value. In
CODIL the equivalent “structure” would represent a
single value, a list, a range, negation (i.e that the DISEASE was NOT
“Smallpox”) or ANY or NONE. He is so concerned with retrieval from well-structured files that he overlooks the extremely flexible and novel storage facilities CODIL provides automatically.

[4]
He is commenting on the “pilot program” which was a research tool
written to explore the system's ability to handle a wide range of
tasks which might be difficult to handle conventional computing
techniques. To CODIL a conventional well-structured file is
equivalent to a CODIL file in which every statement has the same
structure and it would been have a straight-forward task to add a
parameter driven interface to handle the searching of conventional
files if it was decided to produce a commercial package. He is
shooting at imaginary obstacles. (To be fair, a 1970s all singing and
dancing CODIL commercial software package would have been slow
compared with a conventional package if only used for 100%
conventional applications on 100% conventional files.)

[5]
Of course there were limitations
in the “pilot program” as it was only designed to research the
idea. While testing was done in batch mode (the only computer
facilities available to me) all was set up to simulate online use. Part of
the original design involved simulating associative addressing, and
indexing was a key element of the earlier sales accounting proposals
which depended on rapid processing of files involving some 5,000
product lines and some 250,000 customers. Current research (2011)
suggest the approach could easily be modified to work on a neural
net. The idea that anyone should want to use CODIL in batch mode if
terminals were available had a very low priority in the design
philosophy, which was to give the user direct, hands on, control.

[6]
The CODIL software in 1970 was only designed to be a research
testbed!!!

[7]
Virtually all data processing tasks at the time (and most now) are
based on the assumption that all the data that matters can be
squeezed into pre-designed fixed sized boxes called records. This
means that the resulting systems work best at handling highly
repetitive predicable data manipulation tasks. But in the real world the
key problems are often the “exceptions” which were not anticipated and
which will not fit in the predefined boxes. CODIL is
designed to allow people to work with computers on tasks which fall
“outside the box.” The writer has clearly never thought of the
problem “what is it that conventional computer systems find
difficult or impossible?” which is the question that led to CODIL.

[8]
PEARL was developed at Cornel University, starting in 1968 and the
approach was described as constructive mathematics. I was unaware of
the work at the time and a quick look at some of the later papers
suggest that it was aimed at the sophisticated academic mathematician
working within the conventional stored program philosophy. I can see
no reason for comparing it with the CODIL approach., which is aimed
at helping real people (not academic mathematicians) to work online
with complex and somewhat unpredictable real world tasks.

Report by
A. F. Besley, dated 6th
February 1970

This is similar in
concept to the "CANTOR"[9]
system (which I think has now been abandoned). Such a technique would
be of value on 3rd generation machines, but maybe the architecture of
4th generation machines will mitigate the need (being better
orientated for commercial, multiaccess data processing)[10].

Re recommendations, I
think the results should be published as I believe there are many
other groups beavering away at developing such a processing technique
(besides CANTOR I know that Bull GE also are). The CODIL project has
achieved some practical results and I am sure we would loose nothing
by airing these in an article. Field trials might be difficult to
organise - unless N/R[11]
believe there will be a need for CODIL type processing - do not
recommend. The other recommendations should be reconsidered after any
article has been published, dependant on the
interest aroused[12].

[9]
Georg Cantor was a mathematician who made some major advances in set
theory. His name has been used in a number of systems, and I was
unable to identify the CANTOR system described here. However I
suspect that, like PEARL, that this CANTOR was aimed at providing
better formal pre-definitions of the task from the point of view of
the mathematician, rather that as a tool for helping the average
human being to work symbiotically with open-ended tasks.]

[10] The
CODIL pilot program was run in batch mode, using punched card input,
because that was the nature of the facilities provided for the
research. In fact most if not all tests were run as if the system was
being run as if from a glass teletype – which was the kind of
terminal available at the time. I was also well aware of the problems
of running large commercial multi-access databases as I had come from
plans related to Shell Mex & BP first online invoicing system and
I had written the English Electric Computers marketing guide on the
subject. I never seriously considered the idea would be viable on
anything but 4th generation multi-access systems.

[11] = New
Range. One of the policy decisions made by ICL management was that
virtually all research and development should be directed towards the
New Range – later 2900 series – computers.

[12] If one
accepts that Beasley did not really understand the novelty of the
system, or that limitations were due to the fact that the software
was only intended to be a research testbed, one cannot really argue
with his recommendations – at a time when not being accepted by the
New Range team effectively meant no support.]

Conclusions

What
happened was that the English Electric Computers Research Division at
Minerva Road was being closed, and while staff that had worked there supported the
research they were either leaving ICL as fast as they could, or were
being re-allocated to new duties. For historical reason I worked at
Computer House, Euston, rather than Minerva Road, and when Minerva
Road was closed I ended up without any proper management – although
for a time I technically was transferred for management purposes to
come under someone in Stevenage who I only ever met once. This was at
a time when the innovative “Basic Language Machine” project at
Stevenage was being axed.

While Basil
de Ferranti may well have liked the idea, I very much get the opinion
that his ability to assess new research was not considered significant at
Board level. At one stage he asked me to prepare a Board level presentation. Not one director,turned up, and only one sent a
representative from what, it turned out, was an irrelevant
background. I was seen as a problem because I was drawing a salary from no
properly authorised research budget, while no-one had time, in the
confusion of the changes following the merger, to do a proper
assessment. I am sure that to top management all that was needed was a negative assessment and
a lot of short term problems could be immediately solved. So why bother to carry
out a proper assessment when it is clear that CODIL was not yet a
“market-ready” package.

It is
interesting to note that about a month before I was finally kicked
out I got an invitation to present my ideas to an ICL research group
in Bracknell. I had not even known the group existed, and they had
only just heard about what I had been doing. My presentation, given a
few days before I left, was technically very well received and it was
clear that (1) the research team had never been asked to assess the
project, and (2) that they were horrified that it had been axed.

========

For a brief introduction to the political and commercial background to the merger to form ICL in 1968 it is useful to look at the paper ICL: Taming the R&D Beast by Martin Campbell-Kelly.

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About Me

A.K.A. Hertfordshire Chris -
I am, by temperament, a scientist who likes to stand back and get an overview - rather than getting stuck in a narrow specialist area. I am particularly interested in how people process information and how we could design systems that fit into the way that people think.
Since I retired I have been very much involved in mental health service provision (but have recently retired from all committee work) and I run a web site at www.hertfordshire-genealogy.co.uk which provides help and advice for people whose ancestors lived in Hertfordshire.